Question of the Week: 59 - 9/11/2001911 America: Talking Through The Terror...Talking Through The Terror... And helping each other cope with the tragedies that struck at the very heart of the United States. The Witches Voice has opened up this forum in order that Pagans may express their thoughts on the terrorist attacks that took place in NYC and DC on September 11th. As the full realization of what happened and the toll numbers begin to come in, Americans have many challenges ahead.

What are your thoughts on these incidents? How are you feeling? Feel free to post any magickal workings or other support gatherings planned in your area.

WebNote 9/16/2001: Since we launched this on 911 this forum as become laced with powerful inspiration and critical information, feel free to use the search functions on your left to better define the info you are looking for. Search for your area, famous Pagans, key words etc. Also check Wren's Nest News for the latest news related to our community.

Most of my morning had been spent crowded around the radio in the cubicle I workin, with the buyers and the rest of the assistants...everytime we attempted at picking up and working, something else happened. Why do I feel as if we should have known and even suspected was coming? Even though we are so shocked at the event?

My heart, and many others, bleed for this tremendous loss of life...such a tragic day...I fly our flag at half mast...

Pray to the Goddess(es) and the God(s) tonight for all the souls that have been lost in New York City. I'll be going to work again tommorrow in downtown Washington, D.C., but I AM NOT AFRAID. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself", Franklin D. Roosevelt (I stood beside this wall in his memorial after watching the smoke from the burning Pentagon rise above the river from the Virginia side of D.C.).

8:00 PM (EST), Tuesday, September 11, 2001Enid

Disbelief... At The News Over My Radio At Work.horror... At The...

Sep 11th. at 8:31:18 pm EDT

WyndeHawke (Quantico (just south of the Pentagon), Virginia US)

Age: 31

Disbelief... at the news over my radio at work.

Horror... at the unimaginable loss of life.

Sorrow... for those left behind.

Fear... for an aunt and cousins who often work in NYC, for the stepsister who works for American Airlines and often rides the Boston-LA flight.

Relief... at the news that all family members are safe.

Emotional fatigue... at the information overload.

Anxiety... at being a member of the US Naval Reserves, who may be called to active duty.

The answer is “I was working at my computer when Jim called to me from the living room.” The question?

“What were you doing when you heard of the attack on America?”

In August of 1993 I got into a car and drove from what had been my home in Staten Island, New York to a new life I hoped to make in Austin, Texas. As I crossed the Hudson River and ascended into New Jersey, the air conditioning in 1979 Caprice Classic wheezed its last ounce off cool air and I understood that my journey away from New York was not going to be pleasant or without its challenges. My reasons for leaving were many.

As I answered phones that summer in a building like many other buildings in Manhattan, I felt the ground shake beneath me. In a moment of disorientation, I glanced down the hall as others came out of their office to inquire as to whether they were the only ones that had felt the tremor. We stood, huddled, gripping the doorways and fearing that New York City had been hit by the mythical earthquake people always fantasized about but that no one ever believed would ever happen.

Someone turned on a radio, and then we knew. A bomb had exploded at the World Trade Center. We were trapped in the center of the city as subways stopped in their tracks, and a tunnel that I needed to travel through to make it to the ferry was filled with debris. I still remember sleeping in the reception room of my office, whispering to the others in the darkness, wondering why someone would do such a thing. I don’t recall sleep ever really coming, not to any of us. The CEO and the receptionist, the rich and the poor, the Pagan and the Christian, we were united in our situation and in our fear.

I realized that I couldn’t make it there, where bombs could blow up my future, my friends, my cats. As the depth of the terrorist plot unfolded in the subsequent days, moving seemed like a tantalizing idea. Two weeks later, the street that I lived on was evacuated because of a suspicious package on the doorstep of a doctor’s office.

Two weeks after that, I was in a car with my seven cats and two suitcases getting as far away from New York City as I could get.

Years have gone by since I lived and worked in the urban playground that is New York. Years since I commuted on its subways, circled in Central Park, hung out in the Village, read in the back of Magickal Childe. I left it what I had been there in the city, somewhere within its asphalt streets and took off to be someone else, someplace else. I left the problems I had with my father, the failed love affair of my life, the implosion of a coven and broken friendships. I left to find myself anew, or to create a second chance.

Here I am – married, a mother, a business owner, so far away from that twenty year old that ran away and yet I stand again behind a police line, so many miles away and yet close enough that I can turn and watch a body fall over a hundred floors to the ground.I now hold the knowledge of what a body looks like when it is tossed by the wind, of what a plane looks like as it crashes headlong into a building. I have seen with my own eyes people that are so willing to fight for what they believe in that they will still kill anyone that stands in the path of their victory, even if I could not gaze in their eyes.

I didn’t have to see into their eyes. I saw into the eyes of their victims.

I called my father, a man I had not spoken to in nearly three years, a man I had always sworn I would never speak to again, a man who never called me when my son went in to have open heart surgery. A man I thought I hated. I called him and spoke crying, like a child. “Daddy, are you alright?”

He stood at the back of his office building today and described the scene he was looking at, remarking over and over as if in a trance that the buildings were just gone. The skyline that fills my memories is gone. The New York of my youth is gone. “It’s the most amazing thing, Jennifer. They are just not there anymore. Oh, my God, the people.” People walking through the streets, he said. Streaming out of the city, doing anything to get away. He tried to ask me how I was, thank me for calling, but would interrupt to describe another explosion.

He left to donate blood. I left to pick up my son at preschool, and I watched as my country shut down, my government went into hiding, and the footage of the plane continued to be rebroadcast over, and over, and over. I watched as the dreams I had over the past six months, dreams and fears of war and pain, of a change and a shift, of everything we are ever taught to fear about war were rebroadcast in slow motion.

In my mind’s eye, I keep seeing a man in a business suit floating down 100 stories with an exploding building in the backdrop, and tears well up in my eyes again as I remember that man is someone’s son, the son of someone that is probably watching the footage somewhere in the United States this very night.

I look at my son. And I fear. I fear intolerance, and anger, and hatred. I fear the future, and I fear that we never learn from the past. Whether it is witches burning or Jews being gassed or Christians being eaten by lions, it is all the same. The methods of murder, the tools of hatred change with the times but in the end, in the final analysis, it is all the same. Today I mourn them all.

september 11, 2001I woke up this morning to my mother on the phone in tears. "I just needed to hear your voice, I know that you're far away from the city [about four hours] but I just needed to hear your voice." And then she told me. I had to have her repeat herself, because I just couldn't understand. Planes flying into the World Trade Center? The pentagon? Hijackings? I soothed her in shock, "Yes I love you too" then rushed downstairs, looking for someone to tell, to confirm. Gave up, turned the TV on, conveniently set to NBC, and immediately confronted with images of dust pouring down the sides of buildings, flowing through city streets, covering the city of New York in an unnatural mist. Images flash through my head of the terror... the people in those planes who could see what was coming... and the shock of it, seeing symbols of national pride crumble to dust before my eyes. Tears streaming down my face my friend asked me if I knew someone there, but I didn't need to... people watching the TV in shock and horror, exclaimations as my housemates and other friends filtered into the TV room and saw the footage of the second collision for the first time.... the buildings collapsing... the onimous dust looming low over the city....

I really don't know how to react. I tried doing some of my reading for class today and accomplished that somewhat, but I couldn't concentrate. It doesn't really matter since they cancelled classes tomorrow. I might go to the blood drive, as much as the thought of giving blood has always scared me. And I might even go to the Catholic mass on campus tonight, just to be around others praying to their God, even if their God and mine are different

Already, today's catastrophe has been called, "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st Century." I hope this is hyperbole and not prophecy, as Pearl Harbor was followed by a world war of almost unimaginable proportions.

I pray that our hearts be purged of hatred, and that Tyr dispense justice.

i am physically about as far as you can get from these events in north america- over on the west coast, but my classes today could deal with nothing but... however, i talked to my students about what terrorism is and tries to do; that how it wins is to disrupt and terrorise; that the way to win over these people is not through retribution, but in carrying on living, and being ourselves, and not shutting down in fear. this will prove a big day in history, but not the last. any magic i do in the next while will be towards healing this wrongness in the world, not towards hunting down and punishing. i plan to go on; living freely and peacefully. i realise this will go against the grain of many touched by today, who feel that justice must be served, that we cannot sit by, turning the other cheek, but i hold the threefold law above all in this case, and plan to let the terrorists come to appreciate it on their own. it is not my place in the universe to mete out their share of three-times violence. i don't think it is anyone's place. i wish mr. bush would feel as i do, and take the moral high-ground; show he's above such base tactics, and that he will not perpetuate some monster-scale version of a blood feud. that's what this could easily become.bb.

I was awoken today by my fiancee telling me to get up, from the tone of his voice I knew something was horribly wrong. I was in shock at watching the news as it unfolded on tv. Being barely 11am, reports coming in from everywhere it was all confusing at first. As I began to make sense of it, it made even less sense to me. I would say that all of us can understand wanting to make a statement or even being pissed off at the government, I still cannot, almost 12 hours after the first hit, understand why this has happened. As many other folks I will be lighting my candles tonight and sending my thoughts and love to all those who were injured or killed and their families. I try to keep in mind that all those involved with this planned attack on innocent people will end up getting their own energies returned to them, and not let myself get carried away by anger and outrage. All of my emotions are very close to the surface now, the sadness and the fear threatening to carry me away. As I light my candles tonight I will pray for all of us, whether close or far from actual sites affected by today's events.

It was proven today that nothing is sacred to some anymore, and that the U.S. isn't invincible(sp). We all need to reach deep inside of ourselves for acceptance and understanding of others, sending that energy out all over the world might be the best thing that we could ever do. Human life should be always be revered, no matter what others may think.

Besides being a Witch and having been one for a while now, I also have a background as a military officer. This gives me some perspectives. I have two thoughts to offer.

First: Those who committed the deed must be brought to justice. This is basic. I see it also as being perfectly in accordance with what I have learned. An act of war in which one uniformed force attacks another uniformed force is something entirely different. Here, totally innocent people were harmed.

Second: The innocent must not be harmed as authorities pursue their quest to find the guilty people.

A feeling of disbelief has been with me most of the day. Seeing the collapse of one of the wtc building live via tv is stuck in my memory. School went on in the usual fashion except for a few before the start of classes. Somehow we students found our way to a classroom with the tv on the news. First it was just a couple teachers and students who soon left, then by the ring of the bell 25 some students where in this room watching updates on the news. I looked aorund and thought that these must be the few who truely care that this attack can be called the Pearl Harbor of our generation.I just felt that I needed to share that bit from my day. I encourage all people of all faith to unite by sending out good engery to help all who are in need in this crisis.

Having spent all night listening to the news reports on the radio and watching the tv footage, of todays awful event. I would like to send the warmest possible wishes and condolences to the friends and family of those killed both during the attacks and those who died trying to rescue others.I don't think I need to explain how deeply upset and disturbed at what has happened, as everyone, I think, will comprehend completely. It is such a horrible thing to try and understand. So I would like to let you know, anyone who has been effected and I think everyone has, that thoughts are with you from all around the world.

Blessed Be.

I Was In Homeroom At Loyola Academy, Chicago Illinois. Jessica Came In...

I was in homeroom at Loyola Academy, Chicago Illinois. Jessica came in and told us that two 747's were hijacked and were crashed into New York's World Trade Center and another in the gardens of the Pentagon. I don't believe her. Rumors of the east coast were murmured through the class and our teacher couldn't get into any news websites due to traffic. The speaker goes on, immediate silence. I can hear people lick their lips and breath. Once the news is slowly, painfully told, I think, "John Lennon, Save Us!"

All day, the sky was perfectly clear, even the birds were afraid to fly. I could hear other people breath and the traffic outside. My two half-sisters live in New York, yet close to Central Park.

When I first saw the recording of the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center, I first thought it was computer-generated. I couldn't have imagined it in my wildest dreams, until now.

Even now, the memories of what I was doing during "Pearl Harbor Two" are fuzzy and are in slow motion. What happens next?

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